[Cialug] The kernel and my hard drive

[Todd Walton]

On 3/6/07, Jeff <ubuntujeff at jlscharp.com> wrote:
> I am curious as to how important it is to keep up the kernel.

Not so important.  Every once in a while, you might run into a problem
with a certain driver or such that you could fix by updating your
kernel.  But these are rare.  Your driving motto for updating the
kernel should be, "When my distro does it for me."

> When the new version of Ubuntu, 7.04, comes out, is it to my benefit to
> upgrade to that

Yes, update.  Unlike the kernel, it's sometimes important and usually
advantageous to upgrade once in a while to the latest stable versions.
 Don't make it your imperative (you've got better things to do with
your time) but do attend to it once in a while.  And avoid the
bleeding edge.

> And my hard drive. Is there a utility like disk clean-up or defrag for
> Linux or just how does that work.

No.  Disk clean up is not really an issue, especially if you're going
to upgrade the distro once in a while.  (Keep your home directory on a
separate partition.)  Fragmented filesystems are a Windows thing.
Linux uses different types of filesystems that don't have the
fragmenting problem.

-todd